Eye Phone or Spy Phone or?

The article linked below is related to this from yesterday. This whole thing, that is tracking us with phones or name badges, analysing our movements and conversations, reeks of “Big Brother” like monitoring and control. Creepy barely begins to describe it.

…at MIT, scientists who tracked student cellphones during the latest presidential election were able to deduce that two people were talking about politics, even though the researchers didn’t know the content of the conversation. By analyzing changes in movement and communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students themselves realized they were getting sick.

“Phones can know,” said Dr. Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, who helped pioneer the research. “People can get this god’s-eye view of human behavior.”

On the other hand sociology and other attempts to study human behavior have been notoriously non scientific and fraught with observational issues and bias. If this type of research can help us better understand our world then it could have great value. But it is still creepy. Creepy and fraught with potential abuse.